25 July 2023

Bel-Air Season 2: Are you a Will or a Carlton?

Will Smith’s Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was the best youth comedy of the 1990s. But in 2022, it got a dramatic reboot. Bel-Air writer Morgan Cooper’s YouTube parody trailer of Fresh Prince as a dark, gritty drama inspired the OG Fresh Prince, Will Smith, to help him make the show for real.

Morgan and fellow writers Malcolm Spellman, TJ Brady, and Rasheed Newson kept the bones of the original story: 16-Year-old Philadelphia-born and raised Will (Jabari Banks) gets whisked off to live with his mom’s sister Vivian (Cassandra Freeman), her lawyer-turned-politician husband Phil (Adrian Holmes), and their three kids, in their posh Bel-Air mansion, after Will gets caught up in a gang fight. There, charismatic Will immediately clashes with his snobby cousin, Carlton (Olly Sholotan).

Watch the trailer for Bel-Air Season 2

While Fresh Prince played the cousins’ rivalry for comedy, Bel-Air has made Carlton a lot harder to love…and a lot harder to dismiss. Together with actor Olly Sholotan, the writers have ditched the Carlton Dance and stripped back Carlton’s arrogant schoolboy facade to reveal how much he’s suppressed to fit in, often as the only Black kid in school. Carlton has become an expert at policing his tone until Will is tossed into his life like a social hand grenade.

Bel-Air Season 2 digs deeper into how Will and Carlton experience systemic racism, the pressures of Black masculinity, and the effects of violence, all of which test the limits of privilege that wealth gives the Banks family. The push and pull between all of this overflows into Will and Carlton’s growing relationship, as they tackle challenges in wildly different ways.

Take our quiz to see just how different they are … and whether you’re more of a Will, or a Carlton.

Watch full episodes now

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